A agricultura familiar no Brasil e as transformações no campo no início do século XXI.

Abstract

This study focuses on the Brazilian family agriculture and the changes in the field at the beginning of this century, and aims at analyzing the recent changes in the field and implications for family agriculture. The choice of this approach was to start living the author with farmers and their theoretical conception about the contradictions in the countryside. This is an MSc in Social Work, submitted to the Graduate Program in Social Work at the Federal University of Alagoas. The study took place from August 2007 to February 2010, based on a critical perspective. This research started from the assumption that the changes in family agriculture in the early twentyfirst century, have shown a deepening of its subordination to capital, shaped the development of the destructive forces of capital over the field, considering that by incorporating the balance of household production, big capital keeps increasing its process of expansion and accumulation, while expanding its dominance over the field. Based on this study, we have seen in Brazil since the Portuguese colonization, consisted of a hegemonic agro-export model, focusing on large estates in monoculture and in slavery, characterized as 'a specific type of capitalism' in which 'small producers rural', historically, played a secondary role to the dominant agricultural model. However, since the end of the twentieth century, the Brazilian government, under the determination of big business, has justified the implementation of various measures to adjust the called family agriculture by the need for their development, strengthening and expansion. However, such measures actually show the deepening of the process of subordination of rural producers to the determinations of capital should be included as part of the neo-liberal offensive against the constant conflicts in the countryside and the ever increasing need for expansion and capital accumulation.